Opsware sees virtualization catching fire with customers, and the automation software vendor is sounding the alarm: IT orgs better come up with a plan, because virtual machines soon will be sprouting from the ground, falling from the sky, and multiplying like tribbles.
Opsware's plan for helping enterprises corral VMs is to build hypervisor hooks and VM management capabilities into its Server Automation System (SAS). Yesterday at the company's OPSWorld user conference, CEO Ben Horowitz trotted out a roadmap to bringing automation to virtual environments.
Here's a preview of the features list:
* Provision, configure, and manage heterogeneous virtualization platforms including VMware ESX, Solaris 10, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Xen.
* Create/start/stop/delete virtual machines and containers for all these virtual server platforms through a simple point-and-click interface.
* Track relationships among VMs and their hosts.
* Apply the same policies and best practices to managing both physical and virtual environments.
CTO Tim Howes said that the target delivery date is January, and demos at the conference showed that these four bullet points are largely accomplished for VMware ESX and Solaris Containers.
However, even with VMware and Solaris, Howe says his team still has work to do to tighten the integration with the virtualization platforms and tools:
"We can drive the vendor tools to create a container, or a host server, or create virtual zones or virtual machines inside of that. We can show relationships among them, and we can do impact analysis. We don't yet have extensive support for resource pooling. We can't through Opsware call VMotion and move a VM from one machine to another."
We'll check back in a few months.
Posted by Doug Dineley on September 14, 2006 02:13 PM
